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Thursday, 12 April 2007

TeacherTube

I've just been having a look at TeacherTube, the new video sharing website designed specifically for teachers. I think this is a potentially really useful resource. It enables teachers to upload and share videos, either publicly, with anyone who visits the site or privately in 'groups'. The groups feature enables you to limit who can see your videos and could be really useful if you only wanted to share specific videos with your students. You can see a tutorial on how to do this by clicking here.

What's on the site?

There are quite a few videos on there already, but they vary in quality and usefulness enormously!

There is a channel for World languages, which at the moment is pretty small and limited. There are also quite a few on technology and one on professional development. These aren't aimed at ELT but some of them could be quite useful.

My favourite category was the channel dedicated to using TeacherTubeas it has quite a few informative, short videos on how to get the best out of the site.

What's most useful?A couple of the most useful videos I found were this one on how to use Cam Studio. Cam Studio is a useful bit of free / open source software which allows you to record any screen movement and audio that occurs on your computer. This is really useful for making any kind of video computer tutorials for your students. You can find out more about Cam Studio here:http://www.camstudio.org/ and download it from here (2.2Mb): http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/

And watch the video here to see how it works.

Another useful video was one showing how to make posters using Microsoft Excel. This one could even be used as a listening task with your students. If they were viewing it 'full screen', the combination of the audio and the video screen movements should be enough for them to understand it. It's also a good example of what you can make using Cam Studio.

You can have a look here:

If you use this or have a look and spot any useful videos for ELT, please add a link in the comments section below.